Clinton leads Bloody Sunday memorial march

Published: Monday, March 06, 2000

SELMA, Ala. {AP} Thirty-five years after police beat and bloodied voting rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, modern-day civil rights activists traced the same path Sunday with Bill Clinton a white Southerner who credited that march for his rise to the presidency.

Clinton came here to pay homage to the event known as Bloody Sunday alongside two of the men who engineered it: Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Hosea Williams, former aides to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Both men were badly beaten that day. Lewis marches every year to mark the anniversary, and invited Clinton to attend this year, his last in office.

More than 10,000 people stood peacefully in a downtown intersection to see the ceremony. As Clinton spoke, a black man in the crowd waved an oversized American flag, while a white man beside him held up two fingers in a peace sign.

"I, too, am a son of the South, the old segregated South. Those of you who marched 35 years ago set me free, too, on Bloody Sunday," Clinton said. "Free to know you, to work with you, to love you. I thank you all for what you did here."

Clinton locked arms with Lewis and King's widow, Coretta, and led marchers across the bridge. Williams, wearing denim overalls and red sneakers and clutching a metal cane, was pushed across in a wheelchair.

Halfway across, they stopped and prayed. Then they marched on, singing "We Shall Overcome." On the opposite side, Alabama state troopers white and black and National Guardsmen saluted the marchers as they approached. The masses who followed covered the small bridge in a sea of people of all races, a crowd so large many marchers only traveled a few steps.

"You really just get a sense of the fear and the tension people had," said Deidre Hill, 29, of Troy, Ala., who marched with her parents. "This shows that education and reading are really important. If you don't know where you've been, you can't go forward."

Brutal images of the ugly violence on the bridge galvanized many far outside the South to the civil rights movement, and helped win support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Clinton paid tribute to three people who died in that struggle: local activist Jimmy Lee Jackson, the Rev. James Reeb, who died after being beaten at a march; and Viola Liuzzo, shot to death while driving other volunteers.

"We honor them for the patriots they were," Clinton said. "The Voting Rights Act was signed in ink in Washington, but it first was signed in blood in Selma."

On March 7, 1965, all-white Alabama state troopers and sheriff's deputies used tear gas, nightsticks and whips to break up an attempt by blacks and white integrationists to march 50 miles to the state Capitol in Montgomery to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks in Selma.

Some marchers retaliated with bricks and bottles. Lewis, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was among 17 blacks who were hospitalized.

Two weeks later, under the protection of a federal court, King led hundreds of people on the long walk to the capital. The march helped launch the careers of black leaders, including Lewis, but it also helped make way for a new kind of white Southern politician moderate, attuned to civil rights issues and appealing to both black and white voters.

Without the changes set in motion in 1965, Clinton said, "Atlanta never would have had the Super Bowl or the Olympics, and Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton would never have been elected president of the United States."

While applauding the advances in black political participation and other hopeful markers, Clinton said America still has many bridges to cross. He took direct aim at two issues that still cause friction: The Confederate flag and mistrust between minorities and the police.

"As long as the waving symbol of one American's pride is the shameful symbol of another American's pain, we have another bridge to cross," Clinton said.

Later he added: "As long as African-Americans and Latinos anywhere in America believe they are unfairly targeted by police because of the color of their skin, and the police believe they are unfairly judged by their communities because of the color of their uniforms, we have another bridge to cross."

In 1965, Clinton watched the events in Selma from Washington, where he was then a student at Georgetown University. That year, only 2.1 percent of blacks of voting age in Selma were registered to vote.